Rating PD

[Blitz]

My vote is for MA Ermor. Jvelin heavy infantry, plus a nether darting H2 priest? Pure sex.

[HoneyBadger]

I'd just like to add that I'd really like to see a progressively stronger PD rather than just a numerical increase.
What I mean is, at PD 1-19 you get a few weak-type troops and a basic commander, and then when you hit 20 you get another commander and some better troop-types, and then...that's it-for the rest of the game, PD is just a small hole you toss money into, to make the hole a little deeper, hoping your enemy will fall in and not be able to climb out again before you shovel dirt over him.

That's how things stand now.

I think it would be a lot better-especially for nations that start out with weak PD-if they continued to get additional commanders and better troop types as PD increased.
One way to do this-and keep it balanced-is to push the second commander/better troops back to 30 PD, and then add another commander/better troop type at 60pd, 90pd, 120pd, and 150pd (increasing max PD in the process, in case you didn't notice, for those who might want to focus on it, and would now have a reason to.)

This means that, at the maximum 150PD, you'd be fielding 5 commanders and atleast 5 different types of troops, making the act of building strong PD a solid and interesting strategic choice (whereas now it's just a place to dump extra gold until someone comes along and wipes your province out anyway).

It would make castles and core-provinces more important, longer games more interesting, and also blunt the edge of sneaky-quick nations like Helheim. You could even design interesting infrastructure-nations specifically around their PD.

[mivayan]

150pd.... what's that... 10k gold?

[lch]

11325.

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ArithmeticSeries.html
http://www.pen.k12.va.us/Div/Winches...gebra/sum.html

But the maximum PD is 125, not 150. Rest is left as an exercise to the reader...

[HoneyBadger]

11325 gold? that sounds about right to me.

[HoneyBadger]

Before anyone starts ranting and crying about how that's too much gold, too much PD, boo hoo hoo, I *like* playing big games with big limits and big objectives-that's one reason I don't post here very often anymore, aside from Gandalf Parker, too many people thinking small.

So, if you're going to reply along those lines, now you don't have to bother. I get it. It's not "practical". It would never work in multi-player, etc. etc. etc.

There, that saves you time and me a depressing read.

[Jack Simth]

What I would really find interesting is if PD was more of a "budget" than a set grouping of types of troops - it wouldn't exactly be a small change to the engine, but imagine being able to choose your PD leaders and chaff from your purchaseable national troops, each point of PD translates to a particular amount of gold/recources for the army, you set up a troop purchase order, and formation priority, and script them like you would an army. With, of course, some kind of translation for whenever a nation doesn't have any actual national troops.